Hugo Chavez may be dead, but the great cancer of socialism continues to spread

(NaturalNews) Hugo Chavez is dead, leaving one less control freak tyrant desecrating our planet, but one more empty seat of corruption and power to be filled. Chavez died of cancer, we are told, but the cancer of his left-leaning philosophies continues to disease our world, even rearing its head in the United States of America where government policies increasingly mirror those of Chavez.

Elected by deeply deceived Venezuelan voters in 1998, Chavez then confiscated nearly all private business across the country, amassing a personal fortune of more than $2 billion while impoverishing his countrymen under a tyranny of centralized government power. Chavez ran the kind of government that would simply declare your entire company to be "government property," then they would confiscate all your inventory, bank accounts and intellectual property while claiming it was "for the good of the People."

Chavez shows us where socialism leads

Chavez is the poster child for the inevitable result of socialism. Any nation whose voters give up their personal power and attempt to hand over authority to a nanny state government inevitably end up enslaving themselves under control freak tyrants. That, in turns, leads to poverty, injustice and habitual government violations of human rights.

Like every other statist tyrant, Chavez rose to power by blaming all the country's ills on an imaginary enemy. Just as the United States today blames all its problems on fictional "terrorists," Chavez blamed all his woes on the USA. If anything bad ever happened in Venezuela, it was America's fault, Chavez insisted. And his endless promises of restoring Venezuela to global power through centrally-controlled socialist government were nothing more than a cover story to maintain political power while he and his family members looted Venezuela of all the money they could ferret away.

Chavez was technically more of a thief than a leader, and his thievery wasn't even original. His confiscation of national wealth was no different than the very same confiscations that routinely take place in other socialist / communist nations, including China, North Korea and Cuba. If there's one thing the radical left has perfected over the last century, it's the recipe for amassing huge personal wealth for the elite few while the voters swelter in miserable poverty.

(Even after his death, Chavez is still blaming America for his ills... literally! His fatal cancer was America's fault, you see: somehow America conspired to give the man a fatal disease, it is claimed. This was most likely accomplished by shipping him a few pallets of Diet Coke and letting the guy suck down aspartame all day long.)

Chavez the tyrant, worshipped by fools and feared by whistleblowers

There is no death torturous enough for this demon of a human being who used a concentration of government power to endlessly abuse and exploit his fellow countrymen. As Human Rights Watch explains, "Hugo Chavez's presidency (1999-2013) was characterized by a dramatic concentration of power and open disregard for basic human rights guarantees."

HRW goes on to report:

...Chavez and his followers moved to concentrate power. They seized control of the Supreme Court and undercut the ability of journalists, human rights defenders, and other Venezuelans to exercise fundamental rights. By his second full term in office, the concentration of power and erosion of human rights protections had given the government free rein to intimidate, censor, and prosecute Venezuelans who criticized the president or thwarted his political agenda. In recent years, the president and his followers used these powers in a wide range of prominent cases, whose damaging impact was felt by entire sectors of Venezuelan society.

If all this rings a bell, it's because this is a perfect description of the Obama administration in the United States. Here in America, the mainstream media has been completely taken over by the government, and any journalist who asks a legitimate question is forever barred from attending White House press conferences.

The government has taken over the housing sector (Freddie and Fanny), the automobile sector (government bailouts of car manufacturers), the financial sector (government bailouts of Wall Street banks) and the entire medical system (Obamacare). The more you look at Obama's America, in fact, the more it resembles Chavez's Venezuela.

It's even the same rhetoric: Private industry is bad, government is good. Individualism is bad, collectivism is good. Free speech is bad, conformist ideas are good. Keeping your own paycheck is bad, but having your paycheck confiscated by the government is good.

Oh, and don't forget this little gem: If I asked you in which country the President "legalized" the official murder of its own citizens with absolutely no due process or trial by jury, if you guessed that country to be "Venezuela," you'd be wrong. It's America under Obama. (NDAA)

How about this: In which country are the citizens raided at gunpoint for producing fresh farm products that they wish to take to the market and sell to their neighbors? That's America, too, under the government's raw milk raids.

In which country has the system of justice been completely abandoned and replaced with a vindictive police state apparatus where government prosecutors target political enemies? The answer to that question is "Californizuela," the utopia of runaway socialism, located on the west coast of the former "land of the free" USA, where Chavez-style policies have become the norm.

What we can all learn from the Chavez regime

The lesson with Chavez is the lesson humanity seems cursed to learn over and over again throughout human history: any centralization of power always -- ALWAYS -- leads to extreme abuses of that power.

In the wake of those abuses, we consistently find human rights violations, election fraud, judicial corruption, state media control, censorship of free speech, the imprisonment of political opponents and other grotesque artifacts of tyranny. The road to that tyranny is, of course, paved with politicians making wonderful-sounding promises that mesmerize gullible populations. But in the end, the result is always the same: widespread poverty, injustice, censorship, suffering and corruption... a cancerous police state gulag government where innovation, individualism, liberty and justice is brutally crushed.

Transparency International has named Venezuela the most corrupt nation in the hemisphere, matching Haiti and besting the likes of Paraguay and Nicaragua. With a $1 trillion oil windfall, that's lots of graft. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez ushered in the era of high oil prices in 1998, slashing output and earning the country a cool $1.125 trillion windfall as oil prices shot from $9 a barrel to more than $100.

That's bizarre, given that Venezuela remains a crime-ridden hellhole, whose vast slums and impoverished people offer not a scintilla of evidence of any spreading prosperity. ...Venezuela's budget is secret, its oil earnings are secret, its electoral mechanisms are secret, and its media are largely under government control. Whistle-blowers are hit with draconian punishments.

Chavez represents one position along the line of tyranny extremes, with North Korea's Kim Jong-Un holding the winning spot on the extreme left. Chavez ranks about an "8" on this scale, and Obama a close "7." California is a 5 or 6, depending on where you live there.

This U.S. shift toward tyranny is over a decade old, of course. Beginning 2001, America began sharply moving in the direction of Venezuela. First with Bush and then with Obama, America abandoned its founding principles and began to adopt policies of socialism, ever-expanding government and unconstitutional limits on liberty. Today in 2013, the situation has become so insane that the U.S. government now openly threatens the nation with releasing criminals on the streets if its operating budget is threatened in any way (sequestration). This government has become, at many levels, a mirror image of the cancerous socialist state Chavez built for his own personal gain, and it's going to take a real revolution (at the polls, hopefully) to restore liberty in America and rid this nation of Chavez-like socialist scumbags who incessantly seek to dominate and control their fellow man.

Anyone who praises Chavez is a betrayer of freedom and an enemy of liberty. Beware of any person who says Chavez was a "great hero..." They are tragic fools who know nothing of real history and the darkness that lies in the hearts of those who incessantly seek power.

About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs. There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation.

Adams is a person of color whose ancestors include Africans and Native American Indians. He's also of Native American heritage, which he credits as inspiring his "Health Ranger" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution.

Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal, the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books.

In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue, a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.

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